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ON LANGUAGE; Impeachmentese (Continued)

Great events turn unfamiliar words into household terms. Like a fish named the remora, or suckfish, which attaches itself to a whale and goes along for the exciting ride, the language maven latches on to the imposing subject and nibbles on the nourishing usages churned up in its wake.

Every schoolchild now knows the meaning of impeach: ''to charge with misconduct,'' or more generally, ''to cast doubt on.'' A few even know the Latin derivation, from impedicare, ''to fetter, to fix shackles on the feet; to hinder.'' The root is ped, ''foot,'' also the origin of impede and impediment. Mnemonic: The first step on the road to impeachment is putting your foot in your mouth under oath.

But less familiar words are churned up as well. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan regaled reporters in the Capitol corridors with a reading of The Federalist No. 67, by Alexander Hamilton. This Framer, a believer in ''energy in the executive,'' derided worries about a too-powerful President and included this line: ''We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janizaries, and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a future seraglio.''

The janizaries were elite Turkish troops; the word now means ''close aides, loyal supporters''; F.D.R.'s ''brain trust'' was mocked by Republicans as ''the janizariat.'' Seraglio, spelled with two r's in Italian, originally meant ''Turkish palace'' but came to mean ''harem.'' Edward Gibbon wrote in his 1776 ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' that the Emperor Commodus spent his hours ''in a seraglio of 300 beautiful women.'' Hamilton was exaggerating the fears of a monarchic Presidency, and Moynihan was deriding the interest in Oval Office goings-on as the salacious search for a harem, or seraglio.

Another Italian word, imbroglio, ''a confused entanglement,'' was used by editors of The New Republic in a portmanteau coinage. The magazine took bimbo, Italian for ''baby,'' and in English, ''ditzy dame,'' and combined it with imbroglio to form bimbroglio, a description of the complicated mess President Clinton got himself into. The coinage didn't catch on, but the editors grimly stuck with it.

The New Republic ran a fine article by Walter Shapiro, a columnist for USA Today, about the way liberals have stuck with Clinton, which included the line, ''Democrats were pantingly eager to excuse the President's latitudinarian campaign tactics.''

Not only did the freethinking Shapiro make an adverb out of the participle panting, thereby providing an intensified form of eagerly, but he also was first on the pundit's block to use latitudinarian, ''liberal or broadminded in standards of conduct or religious belief.'' (No, the opposite is not longitudinarian; the antonym is ''like a hidebound stiff.'')

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Representative James E. Rogan, one of the most articulate impeachment managers, used a word familiar to bashers of textual deviates: ''Ms. Lewinsky doesn't bother attempting to match the President's linguistic deconstructions of the English language.''

Who says the Republicans don't read Jacques Derrida or go to Woody Allen films? Deconstruction is a philosophy that challenges the ability of language to represent reality. It holds that a reader is free to find meaning in a text that the writer did not intend, and -- in making the interpreter a partner in the creation of copy -- seeks to replace the stability of logic with the fluidity of paradox. Derrida's late-60's antitheory theory, despised by orderly structuralists, has led to much scholarly wordplay and interdisciplinary whipping.

As used by impeachment managers, deconstruction means ''Humpty-Dumpty language,'' taken from Lewis Carroll's line in ''Through the Looking-Glass'': ''When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'' (Woody Allen, in the title of his 1997 ''Deconstructing Harry,'' used the word in its literal sense, to mean ''taking apart,'' I think, but deconstructionists are free to read into his title anything they want and the dickens with the auteur.)

A word with a relatively fixed meaning was used by the Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who denounced the House case as ''counterfeit'' and ''a sham,'' adding for emphasis on national television, ''a pile of dung.'' The word was front-paged by The Washington Post and A-elevened by The Times. It is evidently a socially acceptable word that the O.E.D. defines as ''excrementitious and decayed matter employed to fertilize the soil; manure.'' First spotted at the beginning of the millennium in a Latin-to-Anglo-Saxon glossary under the heading ''Concerning Tools of Farmers,'' it is now ''a term of obloquy.'' In some translations of the Book of Job, the suffering protagonist is described as seated on a dunghill. Harland Braun, a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, told a Times reporter what he thought of the O.J. Simpson case in 1996: ''You can't make a chicken salad out of chicken dung.''

The Democratic Senator Harkin's barnyard characterization of the case recalled a similar usage by the snake-checking Al Haig at the Republican convention in 1988. He compared the Democratic leadership to a bat, ''flying erratically for brief periods at low levels and hanging upside down for extended periods in dark, damp caves up to its navel in guano.'' That is the Spanish word for seafowl dung.

Obloquy, used above to define dung, was used by the lead manager, Henry Hyde. From the Latin meaning ''speak against,'' the noun is less abusive than calumny or slander but much stronger than blame or criticism. The original sense of obloquy was ''evil-speaking,'' but the current sense is the result of all the defamation, vituperation and invective: dis-grace. The philosophic view: Dung happens.